The earliest elementary zoetrope was created in China around 180 AD by the prolific inventor Ting Huan.

It consists of a cylinder with slits cut vertically in the sides. Beneath the slits on the inner surface of the cylinder is a band which has either individual frames from a video/film or images from a set of sequenced drawings or photographs. As the cylinder spins the user looks through the slits at the pictures on the opposite side of the cylinders' interior.

You should be able to make the Zoetrope from found or recycled parts. If you can't salvage parts like a motor or potentiometer, you local electronics shop should have them in stock.

Finding parts:
Remember all those toys the kids have outgrown, or the VCR your neighbor threw out. They all contain switches, motors and wires. It can be a lot of fun scavenging for parts. Just be careful, things like TV's and computers can have high voltages even when they are unplugged. Only scavenge for parts if you know what you are doing. In general, kids toys that are battery operated are fairly safe to rip apart.

This build is a general guide to making a Zoetrope. Make adjustments depending on what parts you find, or purchase. If you make your own Zoetrope, post it in the MAKE Flickr photo pool and send me an email. Thanks!

Supplies you need:

• (1) Old CD - Think AOL, or any demo disk
• (1) CD spindle case
• Paper - Black & white [you can paint the paper black too!]
• Small Eraser
• (1) Motor - Scavenged from a kids toy
• (1) Switch - Again, scavenged
• Some wire

Tools you need:

• Scissors
• X-Acto knife - Be careful!
• Soldering Iron
• Rosin core solder

Part 1: Finding the parts

The first thing you do is acquire some old or broken electronics to scavenge for parts. You can find a motor in many kids toys. If you don't have kids, or know any kids, then just go to the dollar store and buy something with a small electric motor. Hopefully it will have a few switches and batteries too. I bough a small orange fan for $1, and it didn't work at all. Technically the fan would spin, but there wasn't any air movement. It's a perfect candidate for ripping apart.

Disassemble the fan, or what ever recycled toy you have. A lot of times the screws are hidden under stickers so check there if it doesn't open easily.

When I was done I was able to salvage (2) AA batteries, (1) small light bulb, a nice motor, some wire and a lanyard. I'll keep whatever I don't use for another project.

In my bin-parts I had a battery holder, which was scavenged a long time ago. It holds (4) AA batteries. I thought this would be perfect, but I had to cut it in 1/2 so it held (2) AA batteries.

A quick score with a razor blade, and I could snap it in half.

To followup our previous post about this project, New Zealand born, Madrid-based artist, Julian Oliver has released the source code under the GPL for his excellent "Level Head" installation that uses computer vision and ARToolkit marker imprinted cubes as the user interface of a game in which a character moves through a 3D labyrinth. Also, check out this project in person next month at the Ars Electronica Festival.

Levelhead how-to

The makers of World of Warcraft are locked in a legal battle with a firm that has produced a tool to automate many actions in the virtual world. Blizzard is suing Michael Donnelly, the creator of the MMO Glider program, which performs key tasks in the game automatically, such as fighting. Both sides have submitted legal summaries to a court in Arizona.

Mr Donnelly said the first time had had been aware of potential legal action over his program was when a lawyer from Vivendi games, which publishes Warcraft, and an "unnamed private investigator" appeared at his home.

Blizzard has said the tool infringes copyright because it copies the game into RAM in order to avoid detection by anti-cheat software.

Related:

The Future of Credit Cards - Earning virtual currency for spending in the real world & other world bridging.

Animals have senses beyond human experience, they instinctively feel approaching tsunamis through low frequencies, communicate through pheromones or can navigate through magnetic fields.

Students of Design Interactions Chris Woebken and Kenichi Okada, in collaboration with MBA students from the Oxford Said Business-school, have been developing a series of sensory enhancements toys for children to experience "animal superpowers." Each prototype allows the kid to change perspective or feel empathy with animals.

"Stringwalker" attempts to solve the problem of walking with a head-mounted VR display through a virtual space. The project uses eight strings actuated by motor-pulley mechanisms mounted on a turntable to give the walker tangible feedback of their virtual environments while guiding them through the spaces. Just don't try to attach your shoelaces to the guide wires.

StringWalker - [via] - Link

The "Moon in My Room" puts a whole new slant on astronomy. It cycles through all of the moon's 12 natural phases when you click the remote control or can be setup to cycle automatically. Now you can finally produce a lunar eclipse with the shadow of your head.

Moon in My Room - Link, [via]

To demonstrate how much easier it is to use two handed multi-touch interaction instead of traditional interaction, Matthijs created a two handed multi-touch virtual pizza cutting knife for his graduation assignment at Working Tomorrow. Skip the first 75 seconds if you want to go straight to the demo.

We have been using POV-Ray to create 3D models and render bitmap slices that can be printed with the CandyFab 4000, our home-built 3D sugar fabricator. One thing that we could do to extend the usefulness of this procedure is to be able to take STL files as input, because STL is the de facto standard file format for 3D fab shops and the machines that do the fabrication. So, here's how to do it: STL files can be converted to POV-Ray format, and from there we can use our usual bag of tricks to render the set of bitmap slices.

In this article, we explain that process in more detail: We'll take an STL file, import it into POV-Ray using the stl2pov utility, and then set it up to render a series of slices. Our example file is the sculpture Metatron by Bathsheba Grossman, who has released the STL file for it into the public domain (with some interesting results).

On a related note, happy 1st birthday Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories!

The Milkscanner is a tool that allows the scanning of objects and creates a Displacement map for use with Moviesandbox or any other 3D App that would allow for displacement mapping.

Ingredients:

• 1 Webcam
• 1 Tupperware Bowl
• 3 cups of Milk
• 1 custom LEGO rig

You can download the Milkscanner PC-Application (creates the displacement map automatically from a webcam image) from the Moviesandbox webpage too -

Related:

• Moviesandbox webpage - Link.
• Milkscanner download - Link.

Funny thing is that just a couple weeks ago someone from VISA asked that I remove the VISA logo and any mention of VISA in the article, I removed the logo because I really didn't care (and put a silly logo in) but we refused to edit the article... now I know why.

the-inbetween.com has the scoop...

A little over a year ago, Phillip Torrone of Make Magazine wrote The Future of Credit Cards - Earning virtual currency for spending in the real world & other world bridging. He predicted:

Very soon, credit card companies and game makers will reward their customers who spend money in the real world using private label "rewards" credit cards. They will use gifts of virtual currency such as Blizzard's World of Warcraft gold and Second Life's Linden dollars.

The future is now. Further proof of how big of a cultural force World of Warcraft has become. It's the biggest, hugest, money-making game of the decade... and I don't have a single shred of interest in it. I find the cultural and media impact that it makes far more fascinating than sitting at my desk grinding levels for hours on end.

Here's the World of Warcraft / VISA site - Link.

Related:
The Future of Credit Cards - Earning virtual currency for spending in the real world & other world bridging - Link.

Want to know what else is coming? Check our News from the Future section and sign up for the newsletter.

Researchers from Illinois and Florida are developing a networking system which will create virtual representations of real people to improve our knowledge. They will use artificial intelligence and natural language processing software to enable us to interact with these avatars. The goal of the project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is to give us the possibility to interact with these virtual representations as if they were the actual person, complete with the ability to understand and answer questions. We should see the results at the beginning of 2008 -- if the researchers succeed.

More:

• Our next teachers: avatar experts - Link.
• Virtual reality for virtual eternity - Link.

Sign up for the News from the Future newsletter here - Link.

Some people are obsessed with twitter these days. We're not endorsing it, but if you're a twitterer and you want to stay up to date with the makezine blog, the craftzine blog, and the hackszine blog, then you can follow them on twitter and get updates about posts while mobile or on im. Whenever a new post goes up, it'll get twittered with the title of the article and the url of the post.

Unless you have unlimited text messages, you'll want to set it up with im or the internet. Twitter can generate a lot of text messages if you set up that option in the settings.

Big thanks to Kosso, rss wizard, who helped put this together.

Makezine on Twitter - Link
Craftzine on Twitter - Link
Hackszine on Twitter - Link

"Andy and I cobbled together a hardware control panel and wired it to its counterpart in Second Life. We like to think of it as somewhat "entangled."
The physical panel is built on top of an Arduino development board, and connects to Second Life through a series of scripts. As a practical matter, we're hoping more refined approaches can make life easier for machinima and multimedia events in Second Life." - Link.

Related:

• Arduino + virtual worlds - Link.

"Over the last couple of weeks I've enjoyed playing with the Arduino hardware prototyping board. This week's open-sourcing of the Second Life client came at exactly the right time for a new experiment.

Here's a video demonstration (people reading the feed, start your web browsers). On the left you'll see an Arduino reading analogue values from a potentiometer and feeding the results in via the USB-serial interface to my Mac. On the right, you'll see a modified version of Second Life that is feeding those values in via my avatar's chat channel. An object in the Second Life world is reacting, with perhaps a half-second lag." - Link.

Related:

• Arduino-serial: C code to talk to Arduino - Link.
• Arduino projects @ MAKE - Link.
• Virtual world archives - Link.

"Using an exercise bike equipped with a few modifications, you can effectively simulate riding your exercise bike in and around the town of Bullworth in the Playstation2 game "BULLY" by Rockstar.

This is essentially a custom controller interface to an excercise bike, but in addition to the controls it's also the positioning of the bike in front of a big screen like a projector (my projector is from Lumenlab) and the choice of a game with a good matching "bike" presentation that really makes this whole greater than the sum of its parts." Thanks Don! - Link.

Related:

• VR projects @ MAKE - Link.
• Bike projects @ MAKE - Link.
• Playstation hacks and mods - Link.

• Using virtual worlds to make 3D objects and then take the information out for a 3D printer - Link.
• Using physical low cost hardware to cheaply run around in virtual worlds for sci/edu/entertainment and two-way device control - Link.
• Collaborative spaces for artwork, conferences, movie viewing - Link.

Moderator Marisa Olson of ">Rhizome will lead a casual conversation with James Deavin and Eva + Franco Mattes about their respective projects documenting the virtual world of Second Life.

Deavin's Photographs from the New World, mostly landscapes and interior shots, is on view at jen bekman through Saturday December 9th and in Second Life at jbSL, the gallery's virtual location, through the end of December.

The Matteses' portrait series, 13 Most Beautiful Avatars, is showing now at Ars Virtua Gallery in conjunction with the Time Shares series co-presented by Rhizome and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and will be in a "real world" show opening on 11/30 at the Italian Academy, at Columbia.

Space is limited, so please RSVP if you'd like to attend: rsvp AT jenbekman DOT com. More info here.

jen bekman
6 Spring St
(between Elizabeth + Bowery)
NYC 10012

Related:

• Homemade 3D Scanner - Link.
• Project Splinescan - Cheap 3D scanning - Link.

Related:

• Google Sketchup projects - Link.
• Virtual world archives - Link.

For reference, avatars run at a bit under 5 m/s (11.2 MPH) (and fly at about 15 m/s, or 33.6 MPH). World record setting sprinters have been clocked at 10.3 m/s (22.8 MPH), while accomplished long distance runners can manage a 4 minute mile (15 MPH, or 6.7 m/s). It seems like SL avatar running is a little more realistic, at least for normal human speeds." Thanks Mark! - Link.

Related:

• Powered Shoes - Virtual reality input - Link.
• DIY Virtual world "controller" - Link.
• Photos and coverage from the mixed reality gathering... - Link.
• Virtual world archives - Link.

World of Warcraft characters, Second Life avatars, Google Sketchup/Earth can all be "3D printed" and now there's a business that will do it...right on schedule.

Related:

• Fabjectory 3D printing service - Link.
• Fabjectory photos - Link.

Related:

• Avimator - Make your own animations for the virtual world! - Link.
• Developers Corner: Import custom Poser animations to Second Life - Link.
• How to make animations with Poser - Link.

Related:

• Virtual world projects - Link.
• Second Life archives - Link.

More:

• Anvil Prototypes now offers this as service - Link.
• Ogle (use to extract the 3D models) - Link.

Expect to see a booth at the mall that will do this in the next year or so...

While browsing the Google Video wonderland, I stumbled on these virtual Rube Goldberg contraptions. Despite the carnage, they are fun to watch! HL2 Rube Link and HL2 Rube Reloaded Link.

I'll dust off the DIY MAKE VR suit and head in shortly.

Related:

• DIY Augmented reality with cheap hardware... Link.
• The 3D RSS reader (video)... Link.